The hills are newly alive in touring 'Sound of Music'

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music" plays often 'round these heartland parts — the recent epic productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Stratford Festival of Canada still ring in my ears with their full original orchestrations. Even if, like me, you think this is one of the two or three greatest musicals ever written for the American stage, you're likely tempted to skip the touring production recently arrived at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. Especially since this is a Broadway tour that did not flow from a Broadway show, just a title that is known to sell.

But it invariably is a mistake to underestimate the wily old Broadway director Jack O'Brien.

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This is a tour — a union tour with Broadway veterans — of notable quality.

It lands very deftly in the sweet spot of this show: enough traditionalism to deliver the full "Sound of Music" monty (Alps, conveniently prepared backpacks and all) but also a sense of fresh eyes and enough irreverence to cut the Nutella. You wouldn't call it a revisionist production — the designer Douglas W. Schmidt provides traditional Alpine vistas, of the kind that once hung over my parents' dining room table, but they are more artful than you first realize, beautifully connected to the emotional core of the show.

And there is a lot of fresh, fast-paced humor, whether it's Kerstin Anderson's Maria lurking in the background of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen," taking notes; an especially ebullient staging of "Do-Re-Mi"; Melody Betts despairing as a very approachable Mother Abbess; or Iris Davies' Brigitta, always my favorite of the kinder Von Trapp, assuming the moral authority the show affords her and quietly running the lives of the adults.

Anderson, who has a gorgeous voice, approaches Maria not as the traditional blank slate from the abbey for Capt. Von Trapp to write on — once he comes to his senses — but as a geek. This nerdiness works fabulously well, taming the latent sexism in the show and also explaining how this nanny can so instantly bond with a group of unruly and embittered kids. It's rather as is if Maria is being played by a character actress, far removed from the Julie Andrews archetype, and it has the effect of downplaying the romantic conventionalities of the piece.

In watching all these versions of "The Sound of Music" over the years, I've come to understand that the most crucial thing is not that you believe Maria and the Captain have fallen in love, but that you feel sure the children will thrive and prosper once their new mother has finished teaching their old father how to do his job. So it goes here.

This is partly a trend with this piece — these days, the Captain usually has to travel much further than Maria, for she does not become a Baroness so much as he learns how to find his inner-child. But a vulnerable Von Trapp like Ben Davis, whose performance is generous toward Anderson and all the young performers on the stage, always serves the piece better than the earlier, stoic model you can watch on your screen. And O'Brien gives the decision-making skills of the final discovery — or non-discovery — moment to Paige Silvester's Liesl, which is where it belongs. Although O'Brien still makes it clear that she needs her dad. It's an exceptionally moving finale, even if you've seen it a million times.

But Anderson also finds moments of intense truth: I've never seen a Maria in such a total panic at the thought of being sent away from the Abbey, although it makes perfect sense, dramaturgically. If you think about it, life is a whirl for Maria, since the structure of this musical begins with a romantic conflict, resolves it early in Act 2 and then throws in the storm troopers as the Von Trapp inner circle unravels, leaving Maria as the only ally of a single parent and his kids. O'Brien, Betts and Anderson clearly understand that the story of "The Sound of Music" is not just about the forming of a new family but about a young woman forced to leave the place, and the surrogate mother and sisters, she loves. Three times. The last time perhaps forever.

The key scene in Act 2 is when Von Trapp realizes he now can't do anything at all without Maria, and that is the rich sense of self-discovery afforded here. Meanwhile, the kids are kids, looking always for security. They certainly don't find it in Teri Hansen's child-hating Elsa Schraeder or Merwin Foard's self-protecting Max, both of whom sent shivers down my spine and, more importantly, put in my head the thought that children usually get no say over candidates for a stepparent even though that choice will dictate so much of their happiness, or lack thereof.

Like most truly great works of drama, "The Sound of Music" reflects the current moment more than its own; this production, which is well worth seeing, suggests that fathers are learning, slowly, about what they need to do, even as new demagogues abound.